Channel 4 has joined an alliance of some of Europe’s biggest broadcasters that will enable them to run adverts across their digital platforms.
The UK broadcaster joins Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, France’s TF1 and Mediaset in Italy and Spain in taking a 25 per cent stake in the joint venture.
European Broadcaster Exchange (EBX) is a newly created digital ad sales venture, based in London, and aims to be the leading hub for planning pan-European campaigns.
It is expected to launch in early 2018, and will “establish a quality broadcaster European VoD exchange to cater for the growing demand for multi-territory video campaigns at scale, initially traded programmatically.”
EBX will also launch a “deeper, strategic collaboration between the broadcasters to drive forward technological development in online advertising.”
ProSiebenSat.1, TF1 and Mediaset’s involvement in the JV has already been approved by the European competition authorities and cleared by antitrust. Channel 4’s involvement is also subject to similar European competition and antitrust approvals.
Jonathan Lewis, head of digital and partnership innovation at Channel 4 said: “The demand for multi-territory digital ad campaigns in brand safe and transparent environments is increasing as the programmatic video ad market continues to grow exponentially across Europe.
Our investment allows Channel 4 to cater for this demand exclusively in the UK market and forge closer strategic and commercially successful partnerships with key broadcasters in European markets which will in turn generate new digital revenues for Channel 4 to reinvest back into the UK creative sector.”
